Color screenprint on Arches Aquarelle, 1984. 1118x730 mm; 44x28 3/4 inches, full margins. Numbers 1/12-12/12 (with black halftone), numbers 1/4-4/4 (with dark metalic green halftone), numbers 1/4-4/4 (with purple halftone), numbers 1/4-4/4 (with ultra-blue halftone). Signed in felt-tip pen and black ink and numbered 7/12 in pencil, lower right. Printed by Rupert Jasen Smith, New York. Published by the artist, New York. A very good impression of this extremely scarce print with strong colors.
This portrait of Weisman (1912-1994), the multimillionare philanthropist and contemporary art collector, was issued in a very small, total edition of 24, with four different color combinations within the overall edition.
Warhol's fascination with the cult of personality and fame culminated in some of his most famous, internationally recognized , iconic images of film stars, world leaders and personalities of his day, from Elizabeth Taylor to Jacqueline Kennedy, and Mao Tse-Tung to Mick Jagger. His portraiture spanned painting and printmaking media, stylistically varying little among the different techniques and over three decades of work. In portraits of Elizabeth Taylor (see lot 151), from the early 1960s, Warhol set the stage for the appearance of his famous sitters, working from either appropriated photographs or his own Polaroids, transferring these to canvas or paper and texturing them with areas of bold, continuous color blocks. This style reached its climax in the wildly colorful screenprinted portraits of Marilyn Monroe, 1967, and Mao, 1972 (see lot 159), each printed in 10 different color combinations-- and often varying from gruesome to glamorous.
Warhol started painting portraits on commission in the early 1960s. These works developed into a significant aspect of his career and were a main source of his income in the 1970s. Many of his subjects were well known in international social circles, the art world and the entertainment industry at this time (if not on the same fame level as Marilyn Monroe or Mick Jagger however). This commission practice occasionally overlapped with his printmaking, as in this portrait of the lesser-known Weisman. Warhol achieved greater uniqueness in these more obscure printed portraits by having them produced in extremely small editions and in varying color schemes, thereby further reducing the limit of the edition.
Writing in The Nation in 1989, Arthur Danto best summed up the allure of Warhol's portraiture and the overwhelming success of his portrait commissions, noting that, "I think eventually people competed to be portrayed by Warhol because that appeared to give them instant immortality of the sort usually enjoyed only by the greatest of stars or the most celebrated products, as if they were also part of the common consciousness of the time." Feldman 328.
